The Nameless Dead and the Cold Case Unit That Tries to Identify Them

A little-known squad of New York’s medical examiner’s office uses dogs, DNA and any other available clue to identify bodies.

When a mysterious body washed up on the rocks near the Brooklyn Bridge Park’s cheery carousel in August, the authorities had no clue who he was or how he had died.

The remains were so badly decomposed after weeks in the water that identification by face, fingerprints or other physical clues was impossible. And thus another body bag tagged “Name Unknown” was delivered to a little-known squad of investigators from the city’s medical examiner’s office who identify New York City’s nameless dead.

The cold-case unit works out of a faded building on First Avenue that houses the city’s Manhattan morgue, trying every day to identify the roughly 1,250 nameless corpses that have been found in the city dating back to the late 1980s.

“Everybody deserves to have their name in death,” said Dr. Angela Soler, a scientist with the agency’s forensic anthropology unit. “They are unidentified, but they are not forgotten.”

In a wired age, it is rare that someone dies whose identify is truly unknown. With advances in forensic science, genetic and fingerprint matching, as well as national databases and online search methods, the problem has declined to historically low levels.

But in New York these advances cannot eradicate the problem. In a city of 8.2 million, even one that’s a panopticon of video cameras, some people come to get lost and, in death, they succeed. There are a dozen or two stubbornly unidentified bodies each year and a dozen equally stubborn investigators trying to find their names.